A Total Thrashing of Narrow-Mindedness : Overwhelming House vote for National Arts Endowment

There is much that is not only comforting, but also edifying in Thursday’s decision by the House of Representatives to continue funding the National Endowment for the Arts without restricting the content of the works it supports.

For those who have argued that the benefits of the NEA’s activities are clear and their defects occasional, the sizes of the three House votes on the issue were comforting. An attempt by Rep. Phillip M. Crane (R-Ill.) to abolish the endowment entirely was defeated 361-64. An amendment by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita) to impose unworkable limits on the sort of art the NEA may fund was rejected 249-175. Then, by an overwhelming 349-76 margin, the House went on to approve a bipartisan proposal to continue the endowment’s funding with a common-sense caveat: If an NEA grant is used to create a work later found by a court to be legally obscene, the artist or institution responsible will be compelled to return the money.

What is particularly edifying about this result is that the lawmakers most directly responsible for bringing it about--Democrat Pat Williams of Montana and Republicans E. Thomas Coleman of Missouri and Fred Grandy of Iowa--represent precisely the sort of rural, traditionally minded Americans for whom the NEA’s antagonists have so insistently claimed to speak. From the outset, the endowment’s critics have attempted to paint it as an agency dominated by insular, urban elitists arrogantly determined to affront the taste and values of the American majority.

It would be difficult, however, to imagine three lawmakers more deeply rooted in the American mainstream or more eloquently expressive of its deepest aspirations than Williams, Coleman and Grandy showed themselves to be in Thursday’s House debate. Coleman, the Republican co-author of the bipartisan funding proposal, outlined with quiet precision the many dance companies, traveling orchestras and art exhibitions now available to the people of his Midwestern state solely because of the NEA. Grandy passionately described the difference made in the lives of his rural constituents by the endowment’s willingness to make grants whose size often exceeds the populations of the towns that receive them. He read a moving letter from an art professor at a tiny Iowa college, who described how an NEA grant had allowed her to hang exhibits of European art that her students otherwise never would have seen.

In a brief speech that had a poetic dimension of its own, Williams described how in eastern Montana, where people are thin on the ground, “farmers and ranchers, cowboys and Indians” each year travel to the top of a butte called Poker Jim, where they watch Shakespeare performed in the open air. They are able to do so, he pointed out, because of an NEA grant.

The NEA bill now goes to the Senate, where the endowment’s supporters fear North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms plans to stage a filibuster against it. Those inclined to give Helms the benefit of the doubt may wish to concede that the objections he voices to the NEA come from within his own heart. After Thursday’s House debate, however, no one may say that such objections come from the American heartland.